


Invitation to Dance

by saellys



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Gen, Offscreen Violence, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-28
Updated: 2015-01-28
Packaged: 2018-03-09 11:41:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3248381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/saellys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Red Room will find its children, one way or another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Invitation to Dance

**Author's Note:**

> This will probably be non-canon-compliant in a week's time, but for now, have all my wishful thinking.

Anna knows, before she makes it to the front stoop, that something is wrong. The light isn’t on in the kitchen, and it’s nearly six o’clock. 

She goes inside anyway.  

Edwin is in a hard-backed chair in the middle of the sitting room, hands tied behind him, and when he sees her he chews at his lip. That alone is enough to nearly send her into a rage, that he feels responsible, ashamed, for something he could not have prevented.

The woman before him turns, golden curls tumbling over her shoulders, and when she speaks she does it breathlessly. “Anna!”

"Fyodora," Anna says coolly. "What do you want?"

"To bring you home, darling," Dottie says in Russian. "You should never have run." 

Anna steps forward into the room, and Dottie moves aside to give her a clear path to Edwin. “I didn’t run,” she answers in English, mostly for his benefit. “I was carried.” Besides, not all of them had blonde hair and blue eyes and perfect dancers’ bodies; not all of them could have charmed their way out of the ghetto. Their handlers had no plans to manipulate paperwork on her behalf, to resist the vast black machine that was about to flatten Europe.

She goes behind the chair and sets her hand on Edwin’s shoulder. He doesn’t flinch in pain and she can’t see any bruises or blood; he probably complied with all of Dottie’s directions like a sensible man. She presses her hip on the back of the chair, gently, to feel where the embroidery scissors are in her dress pocket, and then bends to examine his face, and the motion against the chair works them up and out, tip first. Edwin meets her eyes reluctantly, looks away quickly, and Anna kisses his brow at the precise moment that the scissors slip free and land in his hand. He has deft fingers and the knots aren’t tight enough to cut off circulation; left unattended, he’ll be loose and dialing Agent Carter’s number in moments. She follows his gaze. “Is that pistol an automatic?”

"You like it?" Dottie strikes a pose, looks part schoolgirl ridiculous and part terrifying. "One of a kind. The man who made it is dead." 

Anna doesn’t just  _like_  it. “Pity,” she says. “I was hoping to decide this without bullets.” 

Fyodora never could resist an invitation to dance, but she regards the sitting room dubiously. “Here? I would hate for anything to happen to your husband.”

Fortunately there is a very large, very empty house next door, with no one patrolling it. (Anna Jarvis is the reason Howard Stark has never had to hire private security.) She holds up the keys she palmed from Edwin’s jacket. “Shall we?”

Dottie sets the pistol on top of the radio, and smiles.


End file.
